


lucky pennies from the void

by tealmoon



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Divination, Friendship, Gen, Pre-Undertale, a nice Gaster for once, vaguely an au where monsters perform witchcraft along with canon magic, yeah I don't know?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-04 17:54:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14598516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tealmoon/pseuds/tealmoon
Summary: She didn't expect to make contact with..... an entity?? But now that it's around, what sort of scientist would she be not to investigate further?!(-name redacted- just didn't want to be alone anymore.)





	lucky pennies from the void

For the third time since she had started, Alphys dropped the ring in her shaking fingers, and it rolled under her desk and into all the grit and remnants of spilled food. She really needed to sweep under there at some point. The string she was using was starting to fray too, and it was hard not to think she was making a mess of everything. It had looked so easy when Catty did it, but not for her. Up-and-coming scientist couldn’t tie a knot...

“About time,” she muttered, swinging it around a few times to make sure the ring was properly attached. “Um...Now...” She flicked away a bit of lint, trying to remember the next step. Magic? Probably magic. She sent a little bolt of yellow magic down her finger and into the string, wincing at the tiny wisp of smoke that drifted up. If she had accidentally lit the whole thing on fire, well. Couldn’t get a better omen than that.

It seemed okay, after a few tense moments of staring, and she dangled the makeshift pendulum over her question, hoping the shaking of her hands wouldn’t influence it. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be thinking about, in case her thoughts somehow impacted the outcome, so she tried to clear her mind. Thinking of nothing....no thoughts at all...

It settled to a stop over the third line down on the faded menu card, and she sighed. Couldn’t choose a pizza to eat, so she had to bring in literal divination to keep from spending two hours trying to decide on dinner. And it wasn’t a crystal or metal pendulum, just a dingy ring tied to some twine. Maybe it would have had magical weight if it had been silver or iron, but it was plastic, with a big fake rhinestone in the middle. Too small to fit on her gross sausage fingers, so she found a different use for it.

Maybe it wasn’t real divination, and probably she was spitting on centuries of tradition, but she might as well act like this was a proper ritual and finish it out. “Thank you for...uh, your guidance?” Even if that guidance was extra mushrooms.

...Yeah, this was pathetic. Monster divination was a vast and ancient art, and this couldn’t be classified under the same name as the echo flower predictions, or Old Man Gerson’s annual 78-card spread, which he always insisted was too much to bother with but would ‘cave’ under the begging of the monster children who wanted to know what the year would bring. (She had never seen it herself, but Undyne had raved about it last year.) This was indecisive nonsense.

Still, if it got her to actually eat tonight (and tomorrow too—she had a high tolerance for stale pizza), misusing a pendulum would be worth it. Idly swinging the pendulum in one hand, she found the number of the pizza place. Having to type it in every time gave her time to convince herself that she could cobble a dinner out of stale pretzel sticks and soda, so she had it on speed dial. Already her hands were sweating.

She had heard the spiel a hundred times, and it almost never changed, unless there was a rare special. She knew what to expect, and with the menu right in front of her, all she had to do was read off it and give a few practiced bits of personal information. It wasn’t _hard_ , so why was she stuttering this badly? Made worse when the poor monster on the other end had to ask her to repeat the order, and by that point, it seemed more reasonable to hang up, go to bed, and stay there until she starved to dust.

There was a tug at her other hand.

Alphys had been so focused on trying to force out those few words that the hand holding the pendulum had stilled. So why was the ring still swinging wildly? It seemed to get faster when she looked down at it, and before she realized it, repeating faint, mindless uh huhs into the phone, the call was over. (In her distraction, she realized, they had gotten her to agree to an order of cheesy bread too.) By the time she hung up, the ring had somehow picked up enough speed that it was bouncing off her upraised knee.

Carefully, as if touching it could burn her, she set it on the floor. Maybe she hadn’t finished things off, and the pendulum still had some sort of excess energy left in it? She wasn’t all that familiar with anything other than oracle cards, and she didn’t use those much anymore—too upsetting to keep pulling cards like Joy and Acceptance when those concepts had long since abandoned her. Was such a basic answer not enough for one session?

She was in the mood to experiment, but first: pizza. The shop wasn’t that far from the lab, so she wouldn’t have long to wait. Enough time to get dressed so she didn’t scandalize the delivery person, but definitely not long enough to prepare herself for the inevitable small talk that could fit between receiving her pizza and paying for it. Hopefully she had tipped enough to make up for how she basically slammed the door in their face, as much as a sliding door could slam.

With a slice dripping grease onto her hand, Alphys raised the pendulum to eye height. Was it the plastic gem throwing off the weight? Had she been fidgeting without noticing it? Had an air vent come on at an inopportune time? Back in the old days, she would have guessed it was Mettaton playing a trick on her, but lately she was lacking in intangible friends. Or...any friends at all.

She could consider more mystical hypotheses too. Did this ring have some residue energy leftover from whatever human had owned it before it had tumbled Underground? ‘Energy’ was a vague, basically useless term (how was she supposed to record or measure it?), but it was a hypothesis, technically. Or some sort of sentient entity was tied to this cheap, shitty ring.

Might as well test things out. Rather than relying on her shaky and increasingly greasy hands, she taped the string to the underside of her desk, letting it dangle freely. There weren’t any vents under there, and the top of the desk would partially shield it from other rogue air currents. She also redirected one of the cameras to record it, though the tiny ring was barely visible on the feed. In for a gold, and all. She was being an idiot, but no one would know.

“All r-right,” she announced to the empty air, feeling ridiculous. “How about, um. Clockwise circles for a yes, counterclockwise for a no. I want to communicate with you more, if that’s okay.”

She didn’t expect it to do anything. With it hanging like that, there would be ambient movement, but...for the ring to immediately start swinging in a wide clockwise pattern... She was definitely dealing with _something_ here. “Okay... Okay. Give me a minute and we can start.”

Making her way through several slices of cheesy bread, she started jotting down questions on a bit of scrap paper. If nothing else, it helped her focus past the nervous excitement of _something is happening and I don’t know what, but I need to know NOW_. Being constricted to yes and no questions helped slow that down too.

“Are you okay with answering questions?” She might as well be polite, or whatever it was wouldn’t want to bother with her. It started to spin clockwise, and she sighed in relief. After running through a few test questions (is it 7pm, are we in Waterfall, do you know what Waterfall _is_ ) and getting accurate answers, she felt okay diving in. It was interesting, if unnerving, to see how the pendulum seemed to stop itself, so she didn’t have to reset it between questions.

Asking whether it was a spirit, a monster, or a human all sent the ring swinging back and forth, rather than in a circle, which she then confirmed to mean that it didn’t know. She hadn’t considered the idea that something potentially supernatural just...had no clue about anything.

“It’s okay if you don’t know the answers to some of these, by the way. I-I don’t mind??” Well, aside that it got in the way of scientific inquiry, but that would be rude to say. Trying to nail down what it was got more confusion, from ‘magical residue’ to ‘a (dead) ghost’ to ‘a (monster) ghost,’ and everything else she could think of. Aside from ‘are you a figment of my imagination/psyche,’ which got a vehement no, it responded to everything with confusion.

“I guess we’ll move on from identity questions for now,” Alphys said, pushing the pizza box away from her. She couldn’t keep eating just to keep her hand occupied, with nausea starting to set in. And the rest of her questions were making her uneasy, now that she actually had to ask them.

“Are you tied to the ring?” No.

“Are you wandering through?” No.

“Did you mean to come to the lab?” After some confusion, a yes.

Definitely starting to feel sick now, and more sympathetic towards the clueless protagonists in horror anime that she had always mocked for trying to communicate with clearly harmful entities. She didn’t want to ask, but... “Did you come here intending to talk to me?”

A yes. She couldn’t ask _why_ with just a pendulum, and definitely she couldn’t think of why a spirit would bother with her, but....“Have you been here for longer than today?”

That yes was enough to set her off, and she wobbled to her feet, accidentally kicking the box of cheesy bread and slopping a few pieces onto the floor. “How long, then? A week? Longer than that?” She knew she should have given it time to react to one thing at a time, but from the way it was continuing to spin clockwise, she had good reason to be freaking the fuck out.

It was one thing for it to be a spirit she had brought in with that ring. Yes, it had seen her gorging herself, and that was embarrassing, but if it had been hanging around and only got the chance to communicate that day, then it would have seen her at her worst. Not only her wandering around in her underwear, and talking to herself, and watching explicit, barely censored anime. Whatever this was had also witnessed her bursting into tears listening to Asgore’s voicemails, and tending to the Amalgamates, if it had followed her down there.

“I didn’t invite you in here,” she said, her voice cracking as she tried to keep from screaming. “And you didn’t ask to come in. You need to leave, n-now.” And if it didn’t leave on her command, would she be able to _make_ it leave? Had it seen enough of her to know she was magically weak?

And then it started to sway in confusion. With a shriek, her hands crackling with yellow magic, she lunged forward, tearing the string down and flinging all of it into a cluttered corner. Even if it wasn’t tied to the ring, the message must have been clear. “Get out! Get out of here right f-f-fucking _now_!” As she stared at her desk, not knowing where else to look, her chest heaving, her papers fluttered briefly. Her scales prickled, and then....nothing.

Was it gone? Was it malicious enough to hide? There were probably rituals to banish spirits, but she had never bothered with that sort of thing in the past. Nervously, glancing over her shoulder as if it was going to somehow gain physical form and sneak up on her, she reached for her keyboard and began to search.

-

It was the kind of thing she hadn’t noticed until it was gone. Breezes she had attributed to the vents, faint buzzing that maybe wasn’t the lights after all. Whoever—whatever—it was had apparently been scared off by her outburst. Or it found her too shrill and annoying to bother with. _Or_ it had gotten all the blackmail it needed.

Guilt was starting to set in, though. Yes, it could have been lying to her, but if it didn’t know what it was... That seemed incredibly sad to her. Was it a spirit so old that it had lost the most basic parts of its identity? Could she help it move on somehow? She’d watched enough paranormal romance with that sort of plot to want to try, and her karma needed the boost.

So she swept away the salt she had scattered over the entrances, which was one of the few things her online sources agreed would keep out unwanted entities, and began to set out offerings on an empty, clean table. Everywhere else looked like a trash heap in comparison, so she hoped it’d stick out to the spirit. People online recommended food, and on the first day, she set out a bowl of soy milk, where it went untouched for hours before she realized that it would get nasty being left out like that, AC or not.

After that, she went with hard candies that came in shiny metallic wrappers, interspersed with a few gold coins. That had to be tempting, right? Even if it couldn’t eat, the bowl looked like a little treasure trove. She felt silly announcing to the empty air that she had set those out for it, but if she hadn’t driven it off permanently, hopefully it was listening.

A few days later, she went to bed with five candies in the bowl and woke up to three. “I’m really sorry for blowing up at you like that; I’m glad you’re back.” As much as she wanted to dive into further communication and head straight to making boundaries, it seemed rude to start with that. She replaced the missing candy with more and tried her best to do actual work for a few hours. From the way her papers fluttered and a pen _happened_ to be in reach when the one in her hand was too dried up to use, it was lingering.

She couldn’t _actually_ focus on the Core maintenance paperwork, thinking about it hanging around. If she was really inviting this into her life, she needed some ground rules, right?

“You know, there’s something I’ve been thinking about... Uh, part of the reason I got so freaked out is that this lab feels like both home and work, for me? Especially the second floor. That’s pretty much my house, right? I sleep up there and everything. So for someone to come in without my knowledge, well... N-not that I’m mad at you! I just want that part of the lab to be private.”

One of her pens began to slowly rotate, the end of it clicking against an empty mug as it came around. Clockwise for yes. Was it lying? “Thank you for understanding,” Alphys forced out. She wanted to tell it to steer clear of the lower levels too, but was that too much restriction too quickly?

No, she couldn’t risk the secret of the Amalgamates getting out, even if this spirit couldn’t shout her mistakes out to the rest of the world. And most of the Amalgamates were so sensitive that an extra visitor would probably throw them into a panic, with all the breezes and flickering lights that accompanied it. “Also, p-p-please stay out of the bottom floor for now? I have some really sensitive projects going on, and anything could interfere with them. Okay?”

In the silence that followed her awkward little speech, she realized how fragile its agreement was. If she could barely sense it, how would she be able to tell if it broke that boundary? Maybe she had fucked up by letting it know that those parts of the lab were important to her, and it would use that against her—

Again, a pen spinning clockwise, and she would have to believe in that, for her own sanity. Aside from warding the True Lab later, there wasn’t much else she could do, and she uneasily settled back into paperwork.

-

She didn’t want to stall too long, in case it got bored, and from the way her figurines were shifting around, it was approaching that point. “Hey, do you want to talk more? I’ve got a new thing we could try.” Ouija boards probably weren’t appropriate for monster divination—too immature, too tainted by humanity— but it’d have to do. She wasn’t sure if this entity was strong enough to write, and she was too protective of her computer to leave a word document specifically open for it, in case its energy could damage electronics. A proper psychic would have channeled this spirit, but automatic writing and the like were miles outside her comfort zone.

She set the scuffed board out on her desk. “What do you think? See, you move this thing around to give your answers. Are you okay with doing this instead of the pendulum?” Remembering back to the pendulum, she added in something else. “Uh, and if there’s something you don’t know, like last time, how about you move it up here.” She tapped the board logo in between the Yes and No options. Considering how confused it had been last time, it needed the option.

 _‘Yes.’_ It was silly to jump, considering that she had already known something was there; the thing with the candy was proof enough. Hopefully it wouldn’t be offended?

“I really do feel bad about freaking out on you the other day, so if you’re interested, I do want to get to know you better. What’s your name?”

The planchette wobbled from letter to letter under her hand, while she scribbled down letters with the other. It seemed like unpronounceable gibberish without any vowels, eventually darting up to ‘I don’t know.’ It was possible it was a language she didn’t know, but she had her doubts that it meant anything.

“I’m...really sorry to hear that? Is there something you want me to call you?” ‘ _No.’_ Could it be her mission to help it recover its identity? Which would be basically impossible if this was a human, but if it was a monster... “Do you know what you are?”

Luckily she had remembered to give it the option of ‘don’t know,’ because it used it liberally. What was the last thing it remembered, what was it looking for, did it want anything from her? It didn’t help her figure out what to ask next, but she pressed on.

“Is there anything you _can_ tell me?” Hopefully her frustration wasn’t carrying through her voice, because she had yet to get more than garbled letters and unknowns.

‘ _darkness, noise, heat. this place is familiar, but—’_ Yet again, it slid up to ‘don’t know,’ but that was more than she had gotten this whole time.

Heat no doubt was Hotland, so had they lived there? Before...before dying. It certainly wasn’t a dark place, though, so who knew what that part meant. “That’s really helpful! Uh. Anything about you?”

_‘no name. no appearance. no age. a nothing less than nothing.’_

“That’s kind of a mean thing to say about yourself??” Though that last bit was pretty relatable. “I’m sure that’s not true. Is there anything more concrete? Anyone you can remember?” She could always try looking at obituaries in Hotland, but how far could she get without a single name of a family member or friend, let alone its own name?

That must have been pushing it too far, because the planchette began to spiral around, picking up speed as it moved from letter to letter. More nonsense, and maybe she was projecting, but it seemed upset. “Okay, okay! You don’t have to keep going! I just... I wanted to know more about you to better help you... I don’t know if there’s any other way to find out who you are.”

_‘don’t help. just friend.’_

“You don’t want anything else? Not any help at all?” It (they?) had seen her, possibly at her grossest—there was no way. They were confused, right? “Are you sure you want _me_ as your friend? There’s other people who might be able to communicate with you better—”

In its rush to the ‘yes’ the planchette skidded off the board, clattering into the mess on her desk and spinning in a way that could only be described as cheerful, clockwise the whole time.

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly I do not like this even remotely, but I'm trying this thing where 1) I forgive myself for my endless writing transgressions, and 2) I actually finish something for once. This was supposed to be 1.5k at the most, and I didn't fit in anything with Amalgamates in it. 
> 
>  
> 
> Do I need a disclaimer where I say that I don't do much witchcraft so this is not a guide or Expert Knowledge.


End file.
